Ayodele Osa Foster-McCray

AYODELE FOSTER-McCRAY, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Engendering Crisis: Living and Thinking in the Age of Black Maternal Mortality,” supervised by Dr. Matthew Kohrman. The study report details a thirteen month long ethnographic project conducted from August 2023 to August 2024. During the project, the grantee interned at a doula advocacy, education, and service provision organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, with plans to expand to rural areas in southwest Georgia, and also served on a statewide maternal health task force and at clinics offering obstetrical, gynecological, and midwifery care. The grantee conducted approximately 65 interviews with various actors, including midwives, doulas, birthing people, and physicians. This ethnographic study asks how health and care are imagined and instated by diverse parties in a landscape inscribed both by a recently defined statistical concern and long histories of catastrophic violence in the form of racialized chattel slavery and its legacies. It specifically analyzes disparate ways individuals and communities negotiate crisis frames and realities. With a focus on how socialities are worked through and care is negotiated in clinical sites in Georgia, this project generates a robust anthropological analysis of Blackness, gender, medicine, and public health discourse in a contemporary epoch of emergency.